Black Liberation and Indigenous Sovereignty Is The Future Of America
In 2016, Black Lives Matter activists descended upon Standing Rock reservation, vividly displaying their support in Native American defiance against a pipeline that was set to run through their reservation. “Our liberation is only realized when all people are free, free to access clean water, free from institutional racism, free to live whole and healthy lives not subjected to state-sanctioned violence,” organizers explained. “America has committed and is committing genocide against Native American peoples and Black people. We are in an ongoing struggle for our lives and this struggle is shaped by the shared history between Indigenous peoples and Black people in America, connecting that stolen land and stolen labor from Black and brown people built this country.”
The symbolism of this was deeply powerful, yet something inside of me was hesitant. While many celebrated the move, for me, it was represented more than just a transitory moment. I wondered to myself what this meant for the relationship between our two cultures; would this become the catalyst to heal the trauma that white supremacy had us inflict towards each other? Would we be able to talk openly about Black folks with Native heritage who faced painful rejection by certain tribes? While Black Lives Matter proclaimed solidarity, how would Native Americans return the gesture? With the creation of Black Lives Matter in 2013 and the resistance around NoDapl in 2016, a conversation about Black and Native history, and more importantly, Black and Native healing must be had: it must be a conversation that brings us insight into what Black liberation looks like conjoined with Indigenous sovereignty in the United States, and how the two are inextricably tied together in decolonizing America as we know it.
The complicated relationship between Black folx and Natives is a topic that I’m admittedly quite sensitive about, as it is often a traumatic one; the Dawson Rolls, a commission created by the United States government that actively played a role in erasing the existence of Afro-Indigenous identity, a political move that marginalized a community born of radical involvement of two oppressed peoples. Census-takers often recorded Afro-Indigenous peoples as “colored”, negating their ties to Native American tribes. “Presently, only those persons who can demonstrate an ancestral connection to the Native Americans listed on the ‘Blood roll’ can claim full tribal membership and all the rights and privileges that flow from such membership,” says Carla D. Pratt in Tribes and Tribulations. “Because their ancestors [Afro-Indigenous people] were enrolled as Freedmen whose multi-cultural ancestry was ignored and indeed denied, persons with Native-American ancestry whose race would today be constructed as African-American have been denied their Native-American heritage and all of its accompanying rights.”
At one point until 1776, Africans and Natives were both enslaved in American history — a turbulent time in which two oppressed groups in close proximity collaborated in rebellion. Native Americans who managed to escape enslavement would frequently attempt to free Black folks who were in bondage, as they knew the land well. The first prominent slave rebellions in the Americas, one in Caribbean Hispaniola in 1521, the other in North Carolina in 1739, were of joint African and Native collusion. Maroon communities became commonplace along the eastern coast of the United States, particularly in Florida, where runaway slaves forged an alliance with various Native nations. Negro Fort, a thriving haven of nearly 1,000 runaways and Native Americans, maintained an impressive African-Native army under the command of Garson, a former slave, and a Choctaw chief. While Negro Fort fell to Andrew Jackson’s forces after a brutal massacre in 1816, African Seminoles would continue to best the United States government; John Horse and his collective of Black Seminoles would go on to lead the biggest slave uprising in American history from 1835–1838. What is most notable about this period is how African and Native cultures merged together in a fight for survival, in which we relied on each other’s strengths in order to evade invasion from the U.S. military.
White settlers constantly watched Africans and Natives engage with each other in fear; in the Caribbean, revolutionary slaves in Saint Domingue were using machetes to chop off the heads of French colonial masters, only to rename the island Haiti in honor of the indigenous Arawak people who previously inhabited the island before genocide; in Puerto Rico, a Taino female chief and her partner, a former enslaved African, had established the largest Afro-descendant maroon community in the West Indies, successfully evading the British invasion for decades. For whites, any collaboration we endeavored in with each other was dangerous, and they intended to stop it.
The cultural clashes that later occurred as a result of settler manipulation served to eradicate the foundation of trust that we created among each other while previously in bondage. Most notably, the establishment of African enslavement with the “Five Civilized Nations” served as a severe rift in the history of Black and Native solidarity. The term came into usage in the mid-19th century to refer to tribes who had the greatest chances of assimilating into white settler culture, according to Europeans. The Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole tribes were deemed the closest to whiteness by their farming systems, constitutions, centralized governments, and were distinguished from other “wild” Native American tribes who were unwilling to submit to U.S. providence. It was this that pushed European settlers to introduce the southern institution of chattel slavery of Africans to the tribes. The Chickasaw were noted to be particularly brutal, while the Cherokee opened large farms with plantations; only the Seminoles’ version of African enslavement was notably characterized differently than the other four tribes, as the Seminoles allowed Black settlements to flourish and engaged with them as respected mediators. Our two cultures would continue to clash under the influence of white settler colonialism when Congress authorized six Black regiments after the Civil War — the Buffalo Soldiers, an all-Black cavalry, fought against Native American tribes in the plains and the southwest who were deemed “hostile” to the American government, symbolizing a deep schism in the tradition of Afro-Indigenous radical collaboration in disrupting settler colonialism.
While I’m consistently reminded of a painful past that we share together as two oppressed groups, I’m heartened by re-discovering the heavy bond that we created in times of absolute peril, and the possibility of re-gaining such an important alliance in the future. As oppressed indigenous people, we both come from a history and present of settler colonialism where violent policing, mental health crises, and genocide threaten our resolves to reconnect to our ancestral rites and ancient traditions. The ancestral ways of Africans and Native people are deemed incompatible to a growing technology age in which American settler colonialism seeks to continually extend its reach. Perhaps we two, more than any other groups in this nation, understand the despairing depths of American settler colonialism — and so, our attempt at dismantling America is inextricably tied with each other.
I long for a mutual relationship where Native tribes embrace members with significant African ancestry, actively including them in sacred ceremonies, and including them in the struggle for indigenous independence . I yearn for an alliance that understands that poor Black folks in Flint are indeed in the same category as water protectors as those who are protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline. What is essential is a deeply spiritual and communal alliance in which indigenous sovereignty is conjoined with resisting neocolonialism in Africa and anti-gentrification actions in the poorest hoods in America: a bond where we honestly acknowledge how each of us has at times collaborated with white supremacy as a result of settler colonialism, but still seek to genuine respect, understanding and trust. An interconnection that does not seek to appropriate each other’s means of resistance, but respects the autonomy of the other while working in cohesion. Let it be more than a moment — let it be the future of decolonization in this country.